President of France Nicholas Sarkozy’s new initiative - to outlaw the wearing of a burqa in public in France - has sparked quite a debate over the past week. Adding to it on the New York Times op-ed page is self-identified Muslim feminist Mona Eltahaway, agreeing earnestly with Sarkozy that the burqa in fact constitutes erasure for the women who wear it. She cannily references her own history of wearing a headscarf, and then her decision to remove it later in her life, as a means of justifying her opinion that as long as women wear burqas they are deprived of any identity.

I find this argument quite silly, honestly. If burqas are in fact indicative of oppression in 100% of cases, which I find extremely difficult to believe, then presumably there is some other means of characterizing this oppression that has nothing to do with clothes. Domestic violence, maybe. Economic dependence on their husbands. Illiteracy. Limited access to health services. All of the above. Maybe, if the French government or Muslim feminists or any party interested in “rescuing” these women wanted to empower them to raise their voices and end their imposed silence, they could start by tackling one of these issues rather than mocking what they are wearing. But initiatives of that nature would lack a convenient visual marker for the targeted groups …

And, unsurprisingly, they are not pleased. Even more unsuprisingly, it is not Al Qaeda in Iraq or Al Qaeda from a cave in Pakistan that responded but Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and for Islamic Maghreb we can read Former French Colonies, particularly Algeria, and the country of origin for a good number of France’s Muslim immigrants. Perhaps least surprising of all is CNN’s choice to put ‘Al Qaeda’ in the headline and to leave ‘in the Islamic Maghreb’ for the body of the text, thus illustrating why the group probably assumed that name in the first place.

Professor of English David Bromwich contrasts the arguments in Leslie Gelb’s new book Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy with Obama’s speech at Cairo University in this week’s New York Review of Books. (One has to appreciate the unorthodoxy of this assembly: a doctor of literature reviews a speech and a book, both dealing with foreign policy. An argument for the liberal arts). Bromwich shows his loyalty (and his training) by making several digs at Gelb’s writing style concurrent with his comments on the book’s content:

Gelb marvels at the “streams of diplomacy” that amounted to “a cascading display of America’s unique role.” And again:

The genius of President Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger [in their withdrawal from Vietnam]… was to let the victim drown slowly while they steered the world’s attention in another direction—to the most dazzling and theatrical display of American power ever.

Machiavelli would have appreciated the sentiment if not the economy of that sentence.

The two pieces of writing are reviewed together because, in Bromwich’s reading, Gelb’s book calls for speech like the one Obama gave in Cairo. The speech that was actually delivered, though, has a message that Bromwich sees as directly in conflict with the one Gelb had in mind. Obama’s choice to address the speech not to an American audience but to an Muslim one, buttressed by comments like his candid acknowledgement that colonialism was, um, bad for Muslim-Christian cooperation and his reference to the links between the Arab world and Muslim communities in America, expanded its utility beyond national security.

In my opinion, though, Bromwich seems to gloss the difference in Gelb’s and Obama’s thinking on this issue. Obama’s speech is clearly addressed to a religious group. It is meant to reach Muslims, and their other identity affiliations - Arab, Indonesian, educated, female - are secondary. The only nation he is concerned with is America. Gelb, on the other hand, takes up the issue of foreign relations from a nation-centric perspective. His book actually sorts nations by their positions on the hierarchy of power (with the United States, of course, at the apex). Bromwich faults Gelb for caring too much about winning and not enough about justice; Obama’s speech, in his reading, resituates the debate in terms of relations between civilizations rather than contests between states. I think this might be a little rosy. Rather, Obama seems to have observed that the security threat that 9/11 made apparent is not a security threat from other nation states, so he’s crafted an address designed to woo a religious community rather than a national one. Smart, but not a total reinvention.

And who said that a speech like this can’t also be read as a dazzling display of American power? It certainly isn’t the formerly colonized states that should be held responsible for building bridges between East and West, developed and developing, Global North and Global South. Perhaps Obama is channelling Thomas Jefferson, and using American power less so that it might be greater.

by referring to burqa-wearing women as prisoners. Of course issues of dress in France, namely Muslim women’s dress, has layers and layers of nuance. (See, for one example, Joan Scott’s excellent book Politics of the Veil). But when I hear things like this, I can’t help but think that men should just learn to keep their thoughts on what women are wearing to themselves. It is difficult to imagine anything at all constructive resulting from France’s new investigation into the life of women wearing the veil.

Leslie Gelb, former President of the Council on Foreign Relations, former New York Times correspondent and generally very accomplished man, wrote a media analysis piece for Democracy recently evaluating the elite media’s (and by the press, he means the following five publications Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal) critical writing in the period leading up to the Iraq war and shortly thereafter. His conclusion is that it was a mixed bag; not quite as bad as common knowledge might suggest, but not as good as it ought to have been if we’re going to continue to consider these 5 news outlets the centurions of our democracy. (His terminology, not mine).

More interesting is his analysis is, first, his diagnosis of the problem as structural. Newspapers are supposed to follow the news; that is what makes them good newspapers. For better or for worse, in our democracy, news is what important people do, and so when these important people have meetings where they tell journalists what is newsworthy, journalists typically publish it. This leads to a bias toward information from official sources and often devolves into what Gelb describes as he said/she said reporting. He asserts that this is fine - or at least functional - for day to day affairs, but in cases like the Iraq war is insufficient and constitutes an abdication of responsibility on the part of the fourth estate. Of course, one has to wonder when the administration’s agenda should not be subject to the highest level of scrutiny - is military conflict the only issue worthy of close attention by the press?

Second, he suggest a few different means of shifting newspaper culture to something a bit more conducive to good reporting, most significant among them (to me) the recommendation that journalists be encouragesd to be educated on the things on which they are reporting. Namely, that they should read books. The reason that news analysis reproduces political back-and-forth rhetoric is, in part, because journalists do not understand the policies that they are writing about. There is no doubt in my mind that this is the case. On the other hand, though, one has to wonder which Americans and consumers of these newspapers abroad are interested in reading detailed policy analysis. Just something to consider.

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem points out several obvious but oft-overlooked truths in an interview with Foreign Policy. Firstly, he notes that keeping Syria on a state-sponsors of terror list while asking the Assad regime to assist in combating terrorism in Palestine. His point, most likely, was that Syria is too important for the United States to be sanctioned and isolated the way it has been in the recent past. Decontextualized from Syrian interests, it seems clear that the term “terrorist” has been thrown around by the US government enough to make it entirely devoid of meaning. It’s unfortunate, because it obscures our understanding of Middle Eastern politics.

Second, he points out that part of the US strategy in the region in the past, (as outlined in this op-ed by Max Boot, and which may change as more diplomatic channels open up between Washington and Tehran, Washington and Damascus, et cetera) has been to bring Arab nations and Israel together against Iran. If the objective is long term peace, then this is … a weak approach. He’s certainly not the first to point this out. Gulf states, who host many Iranian expatriates and are only a short swim away from Iran, and generally militarily weaker, have been much more pragmatic in their approach to Iranian relations than has the United States. (Hillary Mann Leverett and Stephen Leverett adopted this position in the NYT only a couple of weeks ago).

on being one of the Palestinian Authority’s only female judges in an interview with IPS. (I heard about this article through IPS’ GenderWire e-newsletter, a great source for news on women globally). She reviews some of the costs and benefits of being a woman in Palestine; on the one hand, gender equality is less a question of rights and more a question of necessity, since Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza face so many challenges simply getting by day to day. On the other hand, since there are limited resources and men are the typical breadwinners, educational and work opportunities for women are restricted.

al Wazir also notes briefly that, since Gaza and the West Bank are currently operating according to different penal codes, the efficacy of the legal system and the future of legal structures in any hypothetical Palestinian state are going to present a challenge.

This interview is an appealing read because, rather than emphasizing assigning blame to any one faction for the issues that Palestinians now face, it highlights some of the challenges that the Israeli presence and the subsequent fallout in Palestian society present now and will present in the future. Any solution - two state, one state, whatever - will have to do more than simply draw boundaries for the Israeli army. Reconstruction will need to take place on numerous levels.

Apparently, other Arab countries, Egypt in particular, do not care for the way Qatar conducts its foreign policy. The United States maintains a large military presence in the Doha area, at Al Udeid Air Base and Camp Al Saliyah; the government has also played host to Iranian delegations. (For a detailed account of Qatar’s supposedly problematic associations, see the Washington Institute’s recent policy brief). As Al-Jazeera is a creation of the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa, the satellite channel has been taking hits as well, such as the following:

Qatar is acting “as a mediator but it is pretending to be a major power, and it is using Al Jazeera for this purpose,” said Amr Choubaki, an Egyptian analyst. “Qatar created Al Jazeera, but now Al Jazeera is creating Qatar. It’s like when you build a robot and eventually lose control of it and it controls you.”

Yikes.

But Qatar’s ‘rogue’ attitude toward diplomacy - namely, forging alliances with countries that the Arab collective considers problematic - is certainly not without precedent. One need only reflect very briefly to think of similar “treasons” … Anwar Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel would probably be at the top of the list. Moreover, Qatar is not the only Arab country hedging its bets as it attempts to navigate a middle ground between Saudi and Iranian influence; today’s Business Week indicates that Oman is charting a similar course. Politics invariably makes for strange bedfellows; the idea that Arab countries’ interests coincide has long since been eroded.

FP’s Paul Collier writes a Pro and Con list as if he were an authoritarian leader (Egypt’s Mubarak was his inspiration). He evaluates the different avenues available to dictators whose power is subject to upheaval. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Option 1: Turn over a new leaf and embrace good government

Pros: This is probably what most people want. I might start feeling better about myself, and I might even leave a legacy my children could be proud of.

Cons: I haven’t much idea how to do it. The skills I have developed over the years are quite different—essentially, retaining power through shuffling a huge number of people around a patronage trough. My God, I might have to read those damned donor reports. And even if I worked out what needed to change, the civil service wouldn’t be up to implementing it. After all, I’ve spent years making sure that anyone who is exceptional or even honest is squeezed out; honest people cannot easily be controlled.

Worse still, reform might be dangerous. My “friends,” the parasitic sycophants with whom I have surrounded myself, might not put up with it: They might decide to replace me in a palace coup. They would probably dress it up to the outside world as “reform”!

But suppose I did it. Suppose I actually delivered good government. Would I get reelected? I start to think about all those rich-country political leaders who over the years have met me, often lecturing me on the need for good governance. I do a rough tally: They seemed to win their own elections only about 45 percent of the time.

So, even if I pull it off, I’m still more than likely to lose power. Best to cheat. But how?

It’s a bit silly, but points out the intense skepticism with which “elections” have come to be regarded in contexts where democracy is modified by words like “young” “emerging” or even “un”. As Collier remarks at the end of this piece, only the truly paranoid resist holding elections, because there are so many possible ways to manipulate the results. I found this part above, though, especially clever, because it points out how entrenched the behaviors of authoritarian governments are. Collier puts it in Mubarak’s voice to be funny, but the authoritarian tradition in Egypt didn’t start with Mubarak and in all likelihood will not end with him. The institution itself may be site of entrenchment here, not the personality of this man:

President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak

… in today’s elections in Algeria. The current President, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, is hoping to garner more votes than he did in the last election (84.99%). Some Algerians are concerned that getting elected for a third term would situate Bouteflika as the next “President for life” in the tradition of Hosni Mubarak, Bashar al Asad, Zine El Abedine Bin Ali, and Muammar Qaddafi. Clearly, he wouldn’t be the first.